How to be Financially Successful

"If you keep doing what you've been doing you'll keep getting what you've been getting."

5 minutes of advice from Dave Ramsey:

Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow

Doctor Syn, Alias the Scarecrow was a favorite of The Husband when he was a child, and he was able to order a copy of the videotape to share with us. This video is a re-edited version of the original 3-part Disney presentation that Disney released in 1964. The VHS we have is a former rental copy and has seen better days, but it's quite watchable. We were interested to see George Cole, who played young Scrooge in the film by that name, in this. It was like running into an old friend.

It's funny, but the Dads in Media Blogathon has me thinking of everything in terms of dads, and there are several in this film. First is Dr. Syn himself as played by Patrick McGoohan, vicar to the area and spiritual father to them all. His calling includes caring for their physical as well as their spiritual needs. Like most fathers he leads both a public and a private life and is willing to sacrifice for his children, but his position is not one born of legal kinship or blood relationship.

Michael Hordern, known fondly to us in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, plays Squire Thomas Banks, widowed father of 3:

His oldest is much mourned, as the family has given him up for dead after he was press-ganged into His Majesty's service several years prior to the events in the movie. Watching this man awake to the fact that the son who has come back from the dead is a wanted man -a criminal for fleeing his slavery- is to watch a transformation. It takes him no time at all to choose between his duty to the crown and his love of his son.

The middle child is a daughter in love with a disowned soldier with few prospects. Dad has warned the soldier off a suit of marriage, suspicious that the young man is more in love with the daughter's fortune than the daughter. It's obvious that the father has already checked into the man's family background with an eye towards looking after his daughter's best interests. At the end of the movie, though, he is converted by the soldier's conduct and encouraged by the vicar to bless the young couple.

The younger son is, unbeknownst to the father, a close ally and helper of The Scarecrow, a local Robin Hood type currently scandalizing the gentry but protected by the poor. Dad does not approve of The Scarecrow's law-breaking habits and flouting of the law and would be horrified to realize a member of his family was an active member of the band of so-called "gentlemen".

Joseph Ransley is the bad father of the piece, "dad" to two long-suffering sons and step-son to a woman who suffers much abuse from him. "None too kindly" is, I think, how one character describes how Ransley treats his father's widow. A coward and traitor, tortured with fear, he is willing to sacrifice anything necessary to save, not his family, but himself. He'll do anything to save his own life and so, as the vicar might well point out, he loses the life he has.

Interestingly enough, there are no moms in this movie. Wait, I take that back. There is one mom, and she's never on screen. Her husband runs to get help for her after she goes into labor. When he is caught by the authorities it ruins the town's plan for dealing with the press gang. The complete absence of moms to go with any of these dads is notable. I might even call it disturbing. I have issues with female characters in the Disney films, and this is a fine example of a particular problem: a lack of meaningful female characters. Ah, well, that's a topic/rant for another time.

It's been decades since I've seen this video, but I don't think I'd have paid so much attention to the "dads" in it if I hadn't been reading the posts at the blogathon that ends today. This movie has 3 definitely distinct types of dad: the spiritual father, the more traditional caring family man and the self-centered dad unconcerned about how his actions affect the family. I'll probably continue to notice the dads in films I watch for a while to come.

Sunday Psalm

Psalm 116

1 I love the LORD, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.

2 Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore will I call upon him as long as I live.

3 The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me: I found trouble and sorrow.

4 Then called I upon the name of the LORD; O LORD, I beseech thee, deliver my soul.

5 Gracious is the LORD, and righteous; yea, our God is merciful.

6 The LORD preserveth the simple: I was brought low, and he helped me.

7 Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee.

8 For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.

9 I will walk before the LORD in the land of the living.

10 I believed, therefore have I spoken: I was greatly afflicted:

11 I said in my haste, All men are liars.

12 What shall I render unto the LORD for all his benefits toward me?

13 I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the LORD.

14 I will pay my vows unto the LORD now in the presence of all his people.

15 Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.

16 O LORD, truly I am thy servant; I am thy servant, and the son of thine handmaid: thou hast loosed my bonds.

17 I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will call upon the name of the LORD.

18 I will pay my vows unto the LORD now in the presence of all his people.

19 In the courts of the LORD's house, in the midst of thee, O Jerusalem. Praise ye the LORD.

KJV

The Princess Bride

The dad in The Princess Bride isn't even in the film, but I think the movie fits the Dads in Media Blogathon theme anyway, because the dad drives the major subplot.

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." Ever since he was scarred for life at the age of 11 trying to kill the 6-fingered man who had just murdered his father, he has sought the man. His thirst for revenge has driven him for 20 years. The scene in which he comes face to face with the killer has the killer begging for mercy, offering Inigo anything he wants. Inigo responds with this cry: "I want my father back." Some things can't be replaced.

Here's that part:


We had seen the play in a children's community theater performance years ago but had not seen the movie until tonight. It was fun.

reviews:
Roger Ebert
BBC
New York Times

Foyle's War: The German Woman

Yes, it's foreign, but it's English language and so doesn't need subtitles.

Our exploration today of Dads in Media, a blogathon hosted by Strange Culture, took the form of wondering about those Mystery! detectives' families. Not many of them seem to be fathers, do they? Sherlock Holmes as a dad? I don't think so. Poirot? Inspector Morse? All of these seem more suited to the child-free bachelor life. Brother Cadfael is a brother but not a father. (No spoilers here.) Miss Marple? Well, never mind that one. A couple of them may have families in the wings to serve as useful subplots. For example, Rumpole shares his life with She Who Must Be Obeyed and has a son who lives in America, but Rumpole's function as a dad is minor.

Foyle is the only one I can think of in which the main character is a dad and where that is integral to the story. The German Woman is the first episode in the series. It introduces us to Foyle as he tries his best to get a transfer from the police services to more active war-related work and as he discovers his son has been called up for active duty. The interactions of father and son are priceless. Foyle is reticent and neither is demonstrative or overtly emotional, but their love for each other and Foyle's concern for his son shine clearly. More is said through their facial expressions and their body language than is often expressed by more talkative but less emotionally honest folk. With these 2 men it's as if each knows how the other feels and so not as much needs to be spoken aloud. Perhaps part of the reason for this closeness and how well they read each other is that Foyle is a long-time widow, so the pair have spent much time alone together, and yet I can picture the family together with Foyle smiling as he watches his wife put their young son to bed or sitting with his head bent close to his son's while working on some project.

Their relationship is touching -an obvious yet unspoken devotion. Sometimes actions do speak louder than words.

The dihydrogen monoxide scare is back!

I remember this one from way back and loved it at the time. The kids got a big kick out of it. And people would fall for it. It was amazing. I think this site is where we first came across this dangerous substance.



HT: E-merging in Indiana

R.I.P. Tim Russert

Sunday mornings just won't be the same. Tim Russert has died suddenly of an apparent heart attack.

obits:

AP:

Host of the program since 1991, Russert was known as the hardest-working journalist in Washington. He collapsed Friday at the office, while preparing for the next show, and efforts to revive him at the hospital failed, his internist said.

Forbes:

Tim Russert was the giant of political journalism.

He made Meet the Press the gold standard of the Sunday talk shows, indeed of any serious television interviewing. He was the model for how to prepare for an interview and how to conduct it on air:

Time:

He wrote memorably about his Buffalo upbringing and his father's influence on him in his memoir Big Russ and Me. As one of his NBC colleagues, Lisa Myers, once said of him, "Buffalo is a critical secret to understanding him," and he himself cited his Jesuit education as critically formative.

The Jesuits are inextricably linked to questioning, and so was Russert. Meet the Press was an institution long before he came to it in 1991, but he made it his own by becoming known for aggressively questioning his Washington guests. In his trademark prosecutorial style — he earned a law degree before going to work as a political aide for New York Senator Patrick Moynihan in the 1970s — he held his guests to account for inconsistent past statements and doggedly followed up on evasions.

MSNBC

Get Religion here and here

Jim Wallis

Head

The Monkees made this wonderful movie:



There a some fun actors in Head: Victor Mature, Jack Nicholson, Annette Funicello, Teri Garr, Frank Zappa, Sonny Liston, Dennis Hopper

The wikipedia article says,

The film eventually found a cult following, although even fans tend to disagree whether the film is a landmark of surreal, innovative filmmaking or simply a fascinating mess.

Life is Beautiful

We watched Life is Beautiful as part of the Dads in Media Blogathon being hosted at Strange Culture. I chose it because of the key role played by the dad and because it has been on the Arts & Faith list of Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films, though I don't see it on their current list. All I knew about the film was that the dad succeeded in keeping his son alive and in good spirits in a WW2 Nazi concentration camp -no mean feat. It turned out to be everything The Husband dislikes in a film, so the dad in our house wasn't overly thrilled with this choice: not only was it a foreign (Italian) film with subtitles, it had much sadness. It had much laughter, too, but sadness was preponderant in the second half.

trailer:


The BBC review points out some problems:

It may have been showered with awards (including three Oscars) and struck box-office gold around the world, but "La Vita è Bella" remains a deeply problematic contribution to the growing body of films about the Holocaust.

The Guardian's review shares the discomfort:

He's managed to make his film without offending the world. La Vita è Bella has broken Italian box-office, and been hugely acclaimed in the US. The Pope has given it at least implicit blessing by having it privately screened, and it's been given a special award by the State of Israel. But I can't help feeling we've turned a corner in the way we think about the Holocaust when a film this naively blundering can pass without question.

The Observer agrees:

Benigni's affirmation has been bought at far too high a price and has a hollow, dispiriting ring.

EW didn't approve either.

Roger Ebert had some positive words:

``Life Is Beautiful'' is not about Nazis and Fascists, but about the human spirit. It is about rescuing whatever is good and hopeful from the wreckage of dreams. About hope for the future.

As I read the reviews I remembered the complaints that Hogan's Heroes made the Germans look stupid and made it look like a lark to be in a concentration camp. But those complaints, like the complaints the reviewers shared about Life is Beautiful, miss the point, in my mind. The dad here is the hero and the focus of the film. His world is his family, and that's what's important to him: he places the well-being of his family, both their physical and emotional well-being, above everything else. I think of a quote from the Monkees movie Head about the human mind being unable to distinguish between reality and the vividly imagined experience. This dad turns a living hell into a livable experience for his son.

Dads in Media Blogathon

Today is the first day of the Dads in Media Blogathon hosted by Strange Culture, who hosted last year's Film + Faith Blogathon. I've been gathering together some movies to watch to celebrate the theme of this blogathon and am looking forward to reading the posts.

Here are the films we watched during the 4-day event:

Life is Beautiful
Foyle's War: The German Woman
The Princess Bride
Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow

I do so enjoy it when folks host these blogathons. I learn to see things I've never noticed before and watch films I've never heard of or made time for.

Robert E. Howard

Today is the anniversary of the death in 1936 of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian. Many of Howard's works are available online, being in the public domain. Conan has been adapted for film with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan. The short story Casonetto's Last Song was adapted by Brenda Dau and Derek M. Koch as a short film which premiered at the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival:

Indestructible Man

Indestructible Man is a 1956 film starring Lon Chaney, Jr.

Chaney doesn't speak at all after the first few minutes, but you do get lots of close-ups of his eyes doing a weird twitchy thing. The detective's narration (Max Showalter) overlays the whole movie.

HT: Video WatchBlog via GreenCine

Sigrid Undset

Today is the anniversary of the death in 1949 of Norwegian author Sigrid Undset. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928.

I discovered Kristin Lavransdatter in young adulthood and loved it. I have a 3-volume hardback edition of the Charles Archer translation, but I'd love to get the new (2005) translation by Tiina Nunnally someday. I discovered The Master of Hestviken later, and I have a one-volume hardback edition of the Arthur G. Chater translation.

There are short biographies here and here. A picture of the stamp bearing her portrait is here.

There is a review of Kristin Lavransdatter here and a reading guide here. The work was adapted for film in 1995.

R.I.P. Algis Budrys

SFSignal reports the death of science fiction author Algis Budrys. SFScope has an obituary.

More:

Ed Gorman
Sweet Freedom
The Independent
SFSignal links to a post by William Shunn.


The image is from Levar's Flickr page.

The Democratic Race in Eight Minutes

This is a great overview of how we've gotten where we are today:



HT: Art Butcher

Collectivism and Science Fiction Syllabus

Positive Liberty has posted a syllabus for an up-coming blog class. I've never heard of a blog class. The course is divided into several sections, and each section has both fiction and non-fiction readings. These are the fiction readings:

Cordwainer Smith, “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”

Isaac Asimov, Foundation

Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night

Gene Wolfe - sections on the Ascians from The Book of the New Sun; especially “Loyal to the Group of Seventeen’s Story,” included in this work.

Philip K. Dick, “The Faith of Our Fathers,” in The Eye of the Sibyl

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing

Charles Stross, Accelerando

There are three films, all of which I've seen.

The non-fiction reading is heavy on philosophy books I don't have and haven't read, and I probably won't make much of a financial investment in this study. It will be interesting to keep up with the related posts, though, and read along as I can.

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke

The video embedded below is an hour-long interview with author Elizabeth Warren. I've seen her in other presentations.



USA Today has an excerpt from the book. Salon.com has a print interview. Business Week's review is here. PBS has a page on her that includes links to 2 videos. NPR has an audio interview. Mother Jones Magazine interviews co-author Amelia Tyagi.

The Harvard Journal of Law and Gender has a review that discusses the issue and the remedies proposed in the book:

Their solutions include a voucher system for public schools, an expansion of public schooling to include prekindergarten education, a tuition freeze on state universities, a reinstatement of usury laws, a tax incentive program for family savings, a commitment to the preservation of bankruptcy protection, and an expansion of state-funded dis-ability coverage. Of particular interest is the discussion of tax-funded daycare programs. Warren and Tyagi argue against such programs, at least in their simplest form:

[S]uch subsidies would make financial life more difficult for these families [with stay-at-home mothers], because they would create yet another comparative disadvantage for single-income families trying to compete in the marketplace. Every dollar spent to subsidize the price of day care frees up a dollar for the two-income family to spend in the bidding wars for housing, tuition, and everything else that families are competing for . . . . In effect, government-subsidized day care would add one more indirect pressure on mothers to join the workforce.

This last point is a novel idea in the daycare discourse. A typical argument for such programs is that they provide mothers the option of working, but, in reality, they provide no option at all, compelling some mothers to enter the workplace despite their own preferences to the contrary.

The list of policy solutions offered by the authors is not groundbreaking, but its application towards the newly identified problem of the “two-income trap” is innovative and useful. For example, to the list of other potential benefits, proponents of school voucher programs can add the partial alleviation of the problem of middle-class bankruptcy. Thus, old ideas, pressed into service by Warren and Tyagi, are given new life in the political arena.

.

The Gospel of John on Film

This filmed presentation of the Gospel of John was a 2003 movie directed by Philip Saville.

from Wikipedia:

It is a motion picture that has been adapted for the screen on a word-for-word basis from the American Bible Society's Good News Translation Bible. This three-hour epic feature film follows John's Gospel precisely, without additions to the story from other Gospels, nor omission of complex passages.

part 1:


Links to the rest of the film are here:
part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15, part 16, part 17, part 18 and part 19.

Sunday Psalm

Psalm 33

1 Rejoice in the LORD, O ye righteous: for praise is comely for the upright.

2 Praise the LORD with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery and an instrument of ten strings.

3 Sing unto him a new song; play skilfully with a loud noise.

4 For the word of the LORD is right; and all his works are done in truth.

5 He loveth righteousness and judgment: the earth is full of the goodness of the LORD.

6 By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.

7 He gathereth the waters of the sea together as an heap: he layeth up the depth in storehouses.

8 Let all the earth fear the LORD: let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.

9 For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.

10 The LORD bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nought: he maketh the devices of the people of none effect.

11 The counsel of the LORD standeth for ever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations.

12 Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance.

13 The LORD looketh from heaven; he beholdeth all the sons of men.

14 From the place of his habitation he looketh upon all the inhabitants of the earth.

15 He fashioneth their hearts alike; he considereth all their works.

16 There is no king saved by the multitude of an host: a mighty man is not delivered by much strength.

17 An horse is a vain thing for safety: neither shall he deliver any by his great strength.

18 Behold, the eye of the LORD is upon them that fear him, upon them that hope in his mercy;

19 To deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.

20 Our soul waiteth for the LORD: he is our help and our shield.

21 For our heart shall rejoice in him, because we have trusted in his holy name.

22 Let thy mercy, O LORD, be upon us, according as we hope in thee.

KJV

Don't Trust Obama?

Check out what you've heard -the gossip may not be true. Click here for one site that addresses some of the false information that seems to abound. It will be updated throughout the election season.


Preferring one candidate over another is The American Way, but we should get our facts straight.